Evolutionary Modulation of Ribosomal RNA Synthesis in Oogenesis and Early Embryonic Development

One of the awesome things about Biological Sciences—particularly if it is capitalized—is its incredible breadth. As matters now stand, legitimate practitioners include all levels from the molecular biologist—who may never see the critter that delivers the juice he works with—to the man concerned with whole ecosystems and communities. Philosophically, and perhaps this is an important point, it also contains some extremes in orientation: on one hand the no-holds-barred experimentalist and on the other the descriptive museum-curator mentality. If the writer were to aim one criticism about the field as it exists today, it is that all of these elements have a contribution to make in the shaping of the profession and of the young people who have announced—with admittedly differing levels of commitment and sincerity—that they wish to place themselves in our hands to be trained as professionals. It is, in fact, a matter of record that communication between the diverse elements in this fascinating field has fallen into bad repair, and that excessive concentration by a department or research group on cellular biology to the exclusion of field biology has led to some forms of tubular vision that has hampered the visualization of biological problems in their total perspective. The writer was fortunate: he attended an essentially classically oriented undergraduate school, saw the mixture of these diverse elements in Cologne and Vienna as a graduate student, and spent his first years as a faculty member in one of the “most molecular” departments in the United States.